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Senior Moments

I couldn’t call it a “senior moment,” singular. It went on too long. Last week I had a lovely fan post from a long-time reader. She was a big follower of the Yamada books but here was referencing characters in a short story that was a particular favorite of hers (Yes, I’m looking at you, Yoko).

One problem—I had absolutely no memory of that story. Yes, I’ve written a lot of stories, but not so many that one (me) would think I could completely forget one, even to the point that I was starting to believe that perhaps she was mistaking me for the author of someone else’s story.

Awkward.

I miss grep. I even miss Win98, in that one regard. There was a “search inside” function built in that would allow me, as with grep, to search within every single story file in my catalogue to determine if, indeed, this one was one of mine or not. And yes, I know there’s a way to do that in Win10, but it’s a colossal pain in the butt. If this happens again, I’ll look for grepwin or something similar. But I digress.

There’s something about writing that most of you already know. Sure, everything you write comes out of you. An experience looking for meaning, an image, a train of thought you’d like to derail, whatever. At the same time, it’s a lot like channeling spirits. You’re not always sure where it comes from, even if, intellectually, you do know, and when it’s done, it’s a separate thing from you. You go on to something else, until the next time. If, in the case of a series, there is a next time.

Which is why I thought I was done with Lord Yamada, or rather he was done with me. After The Emperor in Shadow, the story arc was wrapped up and that was that. Only last night I wrote a new Lord Yamada story. Granted, it was a piece of flash, but I’m thinking of expanding it to a proper short story, at least. There’s enough “there” there. So you never know.

As for the story I couldn’t remember? Something finally clicked, and I pulled it up. “The Right God,” from RoF August 2004, reprinted in my second collection, Worshipping Small Gods.

I hope I’m not telling you something you already know, but if you use Powershell (which is installed by default on Windows 10), you can use cd, gci, and sls to perform a grep-like search.

cd works mostly the same as it does on unix. gci is analogous to ls and sls is analogous to grep.

If you’re in your catalogue (which I assume is a folder on your computer), and each book is a *.txt file within it (at any level of subfolder nesting),

gci -r *.txt | sls “” should work for you.

If your books are *.docx files, then I’m afraid your stuck using the search bar at the top right of the explorer window. You can get that to search file contents, but it’s finicky (which I assume is the pain in the butt you were referring to).

Sounded at first like the story your fan was referencing was a Lord Yamada story, which made me do a double-take when you said it turned out to be “The Right God.” Which, of course, isn’t one. But then I realized you never said she was talking about a Lord Yamada story, just that she was a Lord Yamada fan. You’re not the only one suffering senior moments… Regardless, I’m glad to hear the upshot of all this IS another Lord Yamada story…